Head to head
Mixpanel vs Amplitude
Clarity for everyone, or depth for an analyst. Scored on ten weighted measures, with every price read on the same day.
Mixpanel
6.5/10
No. 14 of 30
Amplitude
6.4/10
No. 15 of 30
The closest fight on this list. Two mature product analytics platforms, founded three years apart, both with generous free tiers, both with unlimited seats, both answering the same family of questions about what users do and whether they stay. Teams agonise over this and the honest answer is that either will serve you well; the choice is about who in your company is going to open it.
The verdict
It depends on whether you have an analyst.
Amplitude is the deeper instrument. Behavioural cohorts, pathfinder analysis and correlation reports go after a harder question than funnels do: not what happened, but which early behaviour predicts retention. Its free tier is the more generous at 2 million events a month against Mixpanel's 1 million, and unusually it gives you the whole platform on the free plan rather than a cut-down version. If somebody's job includes answering behavioural questions, Amplitude gives them more to work with.
Mixpanel is the clearer instrument. Its funnels and retention reports are the most legible in the category and have been refined since 2009, and a product manager can build one without training. That is worth more than it sounds, because the analysis that changes a decision is the analysis somebody actually ran.
The failure mode decides it in practice. A half-configured Amplitude that nobody understands is worse than a well-used Mixpanel, and half-configured Amplitude implementations are common. If you cannot name the person who will own it, take Mixpanel.
Side by side
| Mixpanel | Amplitude | |
|---|---|---|
| Overall score | 6.5 / 10 | 6.4 / 10 |
| Rank on this list | No. 14 of 30 | No. 15 of 30 |
| From | Free then usage-based | Free then event-based |
| What that buys | 1M events and 10,000 session replays a month on the free plan, with unlimited seats | 2M events a month free forever, with unlimited seats on every plan |
| Free tier | Yes, 1M events a month with unlimited seats | Yes, 2M events a month |
| Cookies | Yes, by default | Yes, by default |
| Script size | Tens of kilobytes | Tens of kilobytes |
| Hosting | US or EU | US or EU |
| Trading since | 2009 | 2012 |
| Free events per month | 1 million | 2 million |
| Free session replays | 10,000 monthly | 10,000 monthly |
| Seats | Unlimited on every plan | Unlimited on every plan |
| Behavioural cohorts and pathfinder | Cohorts yes, pathfinder no | Both, and the deepest here |
| Report legibility | The clearest in the category | Powerful, steeper learning curve |
| Experiments and feature flags | Included on Free and Growth | Included, limited on Free |
| Heatmaps | Not offered | On the Plus tier |
The ten measures, scored
| Measure | Mixpanel | Amplitude |
|---|---|---|
| Insight quality | 8 | 8 |
| Privacy architecture | 4 | 4 |
| Value for money | 8 | 8 |
| Setup and time to data | 5 | 4 |
| Script weight | 3 | 3 |
| Analytical depth | 9 | 10 |
| Behaviour tooling | 7 | 7 |
| Data ownership | 8 | 8 |
| Accuracy | 6 | 6 |
| Vendor conduct | 7 | 7 |
| Weighted overall | 6.5 | 6.4 |
Higher is better. The overall figure is the weighted mean, relative to the 30 tools on this list. How this works.
Which one should you pick
Choose Amplitude if
Somebody's job includes analysis, and you will genuinely use behavioural cohorts and path analysis rather than admire them.
Choose Mixpanel if
You want funnels and retention that any product manager can build and read, without a specialist in the loop.
Common questions
Which has the better free plan?
Amplitude, on volume: 2 million events a month against Mixpanel's 1 million, and the full platform rather than a reduced version. Both give unlimited seats, which is unusual and valuable.
Which is harder to learn?
Amplitude, clearly. Its analytical model rewards someone who understands behavioural cohorts and rewards nobody else. Mixpanel's core reports are buildable by a non-specialist in an afternoon.
Do either work for a marketing website?
No. Both are heavy, both set cookies and both require consent in the UK and EU, and both want an event taxonomy that a content site does not have. Use a cookieless web analytics tool for that job.
Is it hard to switch between them?
Moderately. Both consume events through SDKs, so the instrumentation layer is portable in principle, but the property models and cohort definitions differ enough that reports have to be rebuilt rather than migrated.
Both entries above are desk reviews written from published evidence, and every judgement is my opinion rather than a statement of fact. Read the full reviews for Mixpanel and Amplitude, or tell me where I have got something wrong.